I still remember one year in high school....I was just sitting on a bench....first day of the school year.... and there were a couple of new black kids that came...there were not any before that...and a couple white kids walked up to them and what do you think the first thing they said to them was...."can you teach me to dance?" I don't think that I will ever forget that.

Art_Deco saidBTW, I'll toss something in here asked of me at a dinner party last month, by a matron who knows I'm gay:

"How long does it take before a gay person catches AIDS?"

wow....ok...that is the worst yet.

Yeah, I almost fell off the sofa. But I politely set her straight, smiling the whole time, also addressing her confusion about the difference between HIV and AIDS.

But it had a happy ending - I got a commitment from her and her husband to get involved with an HIV/AIDS charity with which I'm associated. She wasn't a nasty woman, quite the opposite, I enjoyed our conversation on numerous topics. But the ignorance about the gay world can be stunning at times, I feel like I'm doing a gay version of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" comedy bit.

Art_Deco saidBTW, I'll toss something in here asked of me at a dinner party last month, by a matron who knows I'm gay:

"How long does it take before a gay person catches AIDS?"

wow....ok...that is the worst yet.

Yeah, I almost fell off the sofa. But I politely set her straight, smiling the whole time, also addressing her confusion about the difference between HIV and AIDS.

But it had a happy ending - I got a commitment from her and her husband to get involved with an HIV/AIDS charity with which I'm associated. She wasn't a nasty woman, quite the opposite, I enjoyed our conversation on numerous topics. But the ignorance about the gay world can be stunning at times, I feel like I'm doing a gay version of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" comedy bit.